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Todd L. Young

Bio

Todd Young is the President, CEO and co-founder of ProspX. Under his leadership, ProspX has gone from inception to being the industry leader in SaaS-based solutions for managing multi-party sales processes in the commercial insurance industry.

Prior to ProspX, Todd held executive positions at Marsh/Sedgwick and Summit Global Partners/USI Holdings where he led the opening of a branch office and established mentoring and practice group programs.

Todd was a consistent winner of awards and recognition during his 11 years in the industry. He is the co-founder of The Grace Foundation of Texas, a community-based organization dedicated to helping provide healthcare, education, career training, and job placement to young adults who have survived homelessness. He is also on the executive committee of the Stephen McDaniel Memorial Foundation. Todd holds a Bachelor of Science from Texas Christian University.

TRANSCRIPT

TALK ABOUT PROSPX.

ProspX is a business social platform that helps insurance brokers, agencies, and insurance carriers collaborate. The day-to-day business for an insurance broker is really to do three main things: stay on top of key industry news,stay on top of hundreds, thousands of insurance carriers and their appetites and the different kinds of risks they're interested in, as well as the resources inside of your organization.

But there really wasn't a system that could help a broker, in an efficient manner, gain that intelligence that they need in those three areas. We built ProspX to help enable that communication to be much more effective, much more efficient, much more real-time, for the benefit the carrier, for the benefit of the broker, and ultimately for the benefit the client.

ANY TEAM-BUILDING GUIDANCE?

I think in leading a team, it's, it's very, very important to check your ego at the door. And we really have a rule at ProspX that when we shut the door and we're brainstorming opportunities, ideas, uh... that, you know, there's not an idea that's a bad one.

HOW DID PROSPX GET STARTED?

The funding of the ProspX was, was very interesting. We started like most companies with angel investments and the founders invested first to kind of get the company off the ground and start to validate the technology.

One of my favorite quotes is "Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right." And that quote came from Henry Ford and I've always loved that because throughout the journey of ProspX, so many different times we've heard "You can't do this" or "You won't be able to do this."

TALK ABOUT THE FUTURE OF PROSPX.

What's next for ProspX is we're always hearing uh... new ideas from our customers on ways to add new functionality, new things that come, you know, on their wish lists that we always uh... make note of.

One of the other things that we look at is uh... rolling out into other verticals, you know, some of our early investments came from people from commercial insurance, people from commercial banking, commercial real estate wealth management, all of them saying there was a huge hole in their ability to communicate, collaborate, and, and gain, you know, business intelligence from industry expertise or resources around their firms as well.

IF YOU WEREN’T AN ENTREPRENEUR?

If I was not an entrepreneur, and knowing that I can't be a rockstar or an NBA basketball player, I would probably be an insurance broker. It's such a great industry, something so important to protect a business.

ANY STATRUP ADVICE?

Starting an organization from scratch you really have to be prepared to wear a number of hats, work countless hours, build a great team, leverage relationships, surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, know how to scale at the appropriate times based on the growth of your company and the needs of your customers.

WHY AUSTIN?

When you look at what Austin brings, when you look at how tight the community is, the culture, the resources, the connections, and once again, looking at live music, the hills, the beautiful lakes here the university, government – it's just a great place to live. It's the right size to raise a family and you know, our company is very, very happy here.

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